Discover Your Strongest Intelligence and Your Unique Learning Style

When you were going to school, did you do well on exams? Was learning easy for you?

Or were you one of those students who had difficulty learning? Did you often feel dumb?

Did you grow up convinced that you weren’t very smart?

If you didn’t do well in school, it might not have been your fault. Our schools are set up to accommodate those students who learn easily by reading and listening, but they often ignore students who have other forms of intelligence and other learning styles.

The truth is, there are many kinds of intelligence. Just because you don’t do well in one kind of intelligence, it does not mean that you lack in intelligence. You need to find out which sorts of intelligence are strongest in you.

To improve your abilities in school and in your career, you need to find out you’re your strongest intelligence is. You need to identify your learning style.

Not every school is set up to teach students who learn best by doing. Most schools are set up to accommodate students who learn best by reading and listening. Those students who don’t learn by reading and listening will often fall behind. They will grow up thinking of themselves as not very smart, but the truth is, their education system did not give them the kind of instruction that worked for their particular learning styles.

Just imagine for a moment that you lived in a world where only people who were very skilled at musical ability were considered to be valuable. And in this world, only those people who were musically talented were considered to be intelligent.

Everyone who didn’t have musical ability was considered to be slow-witted and intellectually inferior.

In this imaginary world, only those people who were the greatest singers, composers, and instrumentalists could run for the office of president, or enter the upper levels of any corporation.

In a world like that, would you be one of the people who would easily succeed? Or would you be shut out of all the best opportunities?

If you had grown up in such a world, would you consider yourself to be intelligent? Would other people think you weren’t very bright because you couldn’t carry a tune?

If you happened to be very good at reading and mathematics in a world where only musical ability was regarded as valuable, would you decide that these other abilities you possess weren’t important?

Do you think it would be fair that other people decided whether or not you were smart based only on this very narrow definition of intelligence?

What if you lived in a world where only athletic ability counted? Or a world where only artistic ability was respected?

You can easily see by these examples that deciding to value musical ability only, while disregarding other forms of intelligence, would be very unfair and quite unrealistic. And the same would be true if we decided that only artistic ability, or only athletic ability mattered.

Yet in a way, something similar does happen in the world we live in. In our world, and particularly in our schools, people tend to value one particular type of intelligence very highly, and they often regard other forms of intelligence as less valuable.

If you happen to be talented at reading, logic and mathematics, you likely did very well in school. You were probably be regarded as very intelligent by your teachers and your peers, and you grew up confident about your intelligence and your ability to succeed.

That is because in our current world, an aptitude for reading, logic and mathematics has been defined as synonymous with intelligence. When you take an IQ (intelligence quotient) test, this narrow range of abilities is what is measured, and then the score is said to be a measure of your intelligence.

So if you happen to do poorly at logic and language because your skills are elsewhere, these tests and our school systems may label you as someone who is not very intelligent.

The truth is, the education system fails many students who simply have different learning styles and different learning needs.

If you want to become a better learner, you need to indentify which forms of intelligence are strongest in you, and which unique learning style works best.

Author's Bio:

It’s not too late to discover the type of learning style that works best for you.
This article was written by self improvement writer Royane Real, author of the popular book “How to Be Smarter” Discover more self improvement articles on many topics at her new website http://www.royane.com

hugo da costa

i couldnt agree more with your words,its true that sometime the educational system hinders one's self to truly develop their intelligence to the max by not following the individual's learning style,or at least point the individual towards discovering his/her own intelligence type. im doing sociology and i was born a psychologist. i have faced so many hardships for that science i love it,i just do, its the one true science i can understand it spontaneously,as if it was talking about something i already knew or had a hunch about.
so you can understand my frustration when i go to class and have to cope with learning sociology and feeling so out of place misunderstood because most of my colleagues cant understand how psychologists perceive the world around them. i ...cant wait to graduate and actually start doing psychology because of that i wasted 6 years waiting on psychology because tha's the way my intelligence is and my learning style

If I understand correctly, it's another way of saying everybody is born a genius, growing up de-geniuses us. “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” (Pablo Picasso). Or, a man pointed out to Matisse what he painted every child could paint. Answered Matisse, "Yes, but you can't." I just talked twice about painters when the subject is really diversity (of intelligence). At least it wasn't intentional :-) The question is: what exactly was, and is, your area of strength (or even of genius)? PS. Laural Clark: in addition to Royane Real's book, you might want to have a look also at Strengthfinders (the book's title, I think) and/or Marcus Buckingham.